People Who Have Lived In Haunted Houses Are Sharing Their Creepiest Stories, And My Blood Just Went Cold
Recently, we asked the BuzzFeed Community to share their stories of living in haunted houses and/or apartments. Here are some of the spookiest stories our readers submitted.
Disclaimer: This post mentions suicide (in stories 11 and 14).
1.The Dog, The Canvas, and The Cross
"My husband and I moved into a new townhouse in June. It's directly in front of a cemetery with very little space between — maybe 100 feet. Right away, we knew something was off. Our normally very easy-going dog was barking more often, he was terrified to go in the bathroom, and he would stare down the hallway as if he was watching someone or something. About a month after we moved in, I was sitting in the living room when suddenly, a canvas with pictures of us attached came flying off a tall shelf. It landed about five feet out from the wall. None of the vases or anything else on the shelf had moved. Maybe two weeks after that, a huge jug of laundry soap fell off a shelf in the closet out of nowhere. I'd also been hearing the sounds of things dropping on the floor and knocking on the door ever since we moved in. We recently hung a cross up and the strange activities seem to have stopped."
—Anonymous
2.The Two Old Ladies
"I used to hear weird noises coming from the walls in this old house we lived in probably about 12 years back. I could swear these two old ladies were arguing in the room next door no matter what room I was in. Also, things would go missing and randomly turn up in weird places (glasses in the shoe cabinet, pans in the lounge, etc.) but I wasn't too spooked. Then one night, I heard an almighty scream and ran to my sister's room thinking she was hurt. Turned out every lightbulb upstairs had smashed except for one lamp in the hallway. I spoke about hearing voices in the house and my sister said she had heard the same. We both wrote down who we thought it was and swapped papers. Lo and behold, we both wrote 'two old ladies.' About a year after we moved out, we found out two old women were murdered there and the landlord never told us."
—Anonymous
3.When in Scotland
"I rented an Airbnb in Nairn, Scotland with two of my friends. The house was a cute, two-story standalone, but it was small. The neighbors' houses were close, but were still separated by small gardens. When we arrived, I told my friends I wanted to shower. They said they were going to the little grocery store to get food for our stay, so I said goodbye, locked the door behind them, and went upstairs to shower. When I got out of the shower, I heard someone singing and music being played over a radio. I thought my friends had come back, so I shouted down the stairs that I'd be down in a minute. The singing stopped, but I didn't get any other response. I went downstairs and realized nobody was home.
My friends had not come back. It was March, and the windows were firmly closed because it was cold, so it wasn't like I was hearing the neighbors. I walked into the kitchen and I heard someone walking around upstairs. I was the *only* person in that house at the time. I felt like someone was standing behind me, so I freaked out a little and sat on the couch with my back to the wall. My friends came back about five minutes later and I told them what happened. The rest of the trip, it felt like someone was watching me and I had nonstop anxiety and bad dreams!"
—Anonymous
4."Zoe"
"My parents bought an apartment about 30 years ago that they say has been weird since the beginning. Strange noises, footsteps in empty rooms, things falling down for no reason — you name it. One Christmas, we were messing with an Ouija board and someone named Zoe came and started to answer our questions. That night, our Christmas tree fell down as if someone pushed it. Later, my mom asked a neighbor who had lived there before us, and...turned out there used to be a woman named ZOE!"
5.Mom's Old Friends
"I grew up in the same small town that my parents were raised in. When my brother and I were little, we even lived in the house next door to the house my mom grew up in. When my mom was a little girl in the '60s, she’d see people coming into her house every night. They’d pull up in an old car and, next thing she knew, they’d be inside. They never did anything aggressive — they’d just open cupboards and drawers to look. My mom would see the reflection from the light in the fridge when they’d open it, and she could hear them playing around on my grandma’s piano.
My grandparents didn’t believe her at first, but this happened for close to a year. My grandpa finally came to believe that something wasn’t right, so he walked through the house with a candle and said a prayer. The people stopped coming after that. Twenty years later, we moved into the house next door and my brother’s room looked into my mom’s old bedroom from across the fence. Every night, he’d wake up screaming that people were looking in his window. He was only two years old, but the people he described were the same ones who used to visit my mom when she was little."
6.The Cape Cod Rental
"I typically don’t believe in the paranormal, but I had a rental experience that still creeps me out. Over a decade ago, I got a winter rental in a small old Cape Cod beach house with a friend. In the short time we were there, several things happened that had us convinced it was haunted. Things (DVDs, etc.) were seemingly tossed off our tables and counters. We sometimes heard weird noises in the attic. The weirdest of them all was that our interior doors had latches that made them hard to open, and there were several times that they inexplicably flew open."
7.The Cat and the Door Handle
"My grandparents owned this old house in Victoria, British Columbia. After they both passed away, my dad and stepmom moved into the house, and a few years later, I left Alberta and went to live with them. My mom always knew there was something weird in that house, but my dad wasn't phased by it. The second week I was living there, I was laying in bed reading and my cat suddenly started hissing and growling at the closed bedroom door. She never, in all the years I'd had her, hissed or growled at anything. Immediately afterward, the handle of my door started to violently jiggle as if someone was trying to get in. I'd never been so scared in my life. Odd things happened here and there, but that was the most sinister thing."
8.The Little Boy in Overalls
"When I was like five years old, my parents bought this huge old house in a small town. We only lived in the house for five months before it unexpectedly burned down. When we first moved in, it was a two-story creaky old house. I remembered feeling uncomfortable there and didn't understand why. I always made sure to stay with someone, never alone. Around two weeks before it burned down, I saw a dark shadow walking through the hallway outside of my bedroom. Needless to say, I was terrified. After the house burned down, my stepdad still wanted to make use of the property, so he built a one-story home. I still felt weird vibes from the new house, but it was not as intense as the old house was. My family members and I all had experiences from that land. One night when I was only seven or eight years old, I woke up, looked straight ahead, and saw a little boy wearing a white shirt with overalls. We made eye contact, and then he disappeared. Fast forward to 10 years later, my younger nephew was having problems sleeping. We all talked to him to figure out why he was reacting this way, and he explained that there was a little boy wearing a white shirt with overalls who kept bothering him and wanted to play. He even said the boy would pretend to shoot at him as if they were playing Cops and Robbers. IN THAT MOMENT, MY BLOOD RAN COLD. I had never told anyone about my experience."
—Anonymous
9.The Sea Captain and His Wife
"My best friend lived in a haunted house. It was in a beach town, and the story was that it’d been owned by an old sea captain and his wife. He had gotten lost at sea, but the wife lived the rest of her life there. When they bought the house, it had a few weird quirks to it, and my friend’s family figured she must have just been a kinda weird old lady. For instance, every door in the place had locks. One of the bedrooms had a walk-in closet that had an extra door that led to the sunroom, like an escape route. You could only get out of that bedroom that way, but not in. It was weird. Weird things happened there, too: my friend's mom would come home and hear a man in the pantry, only to find the house completely empty. Lights would go on and off randomly. Doors would creak open and shut on their own. It had cold spots. People would feel someone touch them. They were slowly renovating it for years and would hear things fall, only to rush to the room and find everything in place. Their dog would randomly growl and bark at who knows what. Once they finished renovations, that all seemed to stop. Still, 20 years later and 12,000 miles away, I still have spooky dreams about that house."
—Anonymous
10.The Colonials
"I asked my boyfriend once if he’d ever seen a ghost, and he said he had as his childhood home was built in the 1800s. I got excited and asked him for any stories, and he said he once woke up and saw people dressed in colonial-style clothes. He told them to go away, but they didn’t until he turned on the light. To this day he refuses to tell me any more stories, but he often goes to sleep with the light on — I think he got used to doing that."
—Anonymous
11.The Shove
"It was my first apartment, and I had just had a baby. I had heard rumors from neighbors that a guy had died by suicide in the basement, but I didn't believe them until one night when I was doing laundry. I hated that basement, and I hated being alone in that apartment. One day, I was walking up from the basement when I fell on my face on the cement stairs. I told my husband that it felt like somebody had pushed me. He tried to convince me that nobody was downstairs with me, until three weeks later, it happened to him. We spoke to a neighbor who had lived there for 20 years at the time, and she said the guy who died was a mean drunk who had had problems with everybody. I asked her if he moved away or died by suicide, and she said he did kill himself, but it wasn't in the basement — it was in our living room. We had moved in that April, and I guess the guy had died by suicide in late December. We just always had this creepy feeling, and we moved out six months later."
—Anonymous
12.The Viewing
"My family went to tour a house for sale when I was young. It was an old gorgeous house, but my mom got a weird feeling on the second floor. She said it was cold, and just felt off. Then the feeling intensified as we were walking up the stairs to the attic. She made us kids stay downstairs while she went up there. We didn't buy the house, and to this day my mom claims it was haunted. She said the spirit there wasn’t a friendly one, and she’d lived in other haunted houses before."
—Anonymous
13.The Noisy Neighbor
"After my first year at university, I moved out of the dorms and into some different housing. One of the older complexes had much lower rent, so I decided to look there. I'd heard rumors that these apartments were haunted since I'd arrived on campus, but I'd figured the rumors had to do with the fact that it was right next to a cemetery. So the next semester, I moved in and everything was going really well. Nothing happened for the first couple of months, so I just figured I was right and all the rumors were because of the cemetery. This changed, though. It was getting close to midterms and I ended up coming back late a few times when I noticed the strangest thing: The apartment at the end of the hall was vacant, but I could see the shadow of someone walking in front of the window. They would walk back and forth, waving an arm like they were talking on the phone. It lasted for a while until they walked out of view and didn't come back. Initially, I shrugged this off as me, not realizing that I had a very quiet neighbor. This kept happening for a while...and that's when the noises began. I could hear someone talking in that apartment. Never anything that could clearly be made out, but enough of the cadence was recognizable as one half of a conversation. Sometimes it was a man, and sometimes it was a woman, but it never quite seemed to be the same person. There were also constant thuds as if furniture was being moved around. My neighbor who lived right next to this apartment asked me one morning if I had seen our other neighbor heading out, as she wanted to ask them to keep it down at night. I told her I'd heard people talking but never seen them. We reported the noises to the building manager. The next morning, the building manager showed us that not only was it vacant, but it had no furniture at all."
—Anonymous
14.Labored Breathing
"When I was seven, my parents bought a house that the previous owner’s wife took her own life in. My brother and I were very young, so they obviously did not tell us when we moved in. After my sister was born, I moved rooms into what was previously the women’s sewing room, and later, her healthcare room. I started hearing very heavy and labored breathing every night and I could not sleep. I would go to each of my family members' rooms to see if it was their breathing, but it wasn't. When my mom asked why I kept sleeping downstairs or on their bedroom floor, I told them someone was breathing too loud. My mom then told me that the woman who lived there before had terminal lung cancer, and lived out her final days in my room. She then died by suicide in the garage. After she told me that, we noticed a few other things happening: my cat would not go in the garage or my room, my baby sister could not sleep in my room — that’s why we switched — and, of course, the breathing. We did a sage burning and told her it was okay to move on, and I have been sleeping with background noise ever since."
—Anonymous
15."Charles" and the Fire
"My aunt lives in a house where a family once died inside in a fire. My oldest cousin, whose room was in the basement, would have horrifying nightmares about a man named Charles with glowing red eyes and no face. He'd get so scared, he'd crawl to the corner of his room, crying. He was 20 years old. "
16.The Black Mass
"There were two presences I felt in my bedroom during my teen years. One had a good vibe, like a protector, the other...did not. One night when I was 14, I woke up to something hovering over my face — like a staticky, black mass with a mouth, its mouth being the only discernible feature. It stayed there for about five minutes (as I lay perfectly still trying not to breathe and quietly making peace with Jesus), and then it slunk to the end of my bed, lingered, and finally disappeared. I didn't sleep for weeks."
17.The Visitor
"We moved into a Victorian house when I was 10. For the first few weeks, we'd hear footsteps going down the stairs and out the front door after we were all in bed. Things would disappear, too — we couldn't keep pens on the desk because they'd all be gone within a day. My mom also had this bell she'd ring when it was dinner time. It sat on a shelf in the kitchen. I was alone in the house, upstairs, and I heard that bell ring! My family didn't believe me until it happened to my dad, too."
—l4e4
18.And lastly: The Kind Apparition
"I used to live in an old apartment building right across from a cemetery. I'd always see shadows in the corner of the rooms, following me. Then, it escalated to seeing an apparition of a lady at the foot of my bed — she never looked menacing though. It was as if she was checking up on me to see if I was sleeping well. This happened every night around 3 or 4 a.m. I still wake up around that time, because it's a habit, but I never see her anymore as an adult."
Have YOU ever lived or stayed in a haunted place? If so, feel free to tell your story in the comments.
Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.